1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to network management, and particularly to automatically determining a device prompt for an unknown network device for recognizing when the network device is ready to receive input commands.
2. Background Art
Networks are composed of a combination of routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, WAN accelerators, and other networking devices. Network management includes accessing some or all of these network devices in order to determine their configuration, modify their configuration, obtain diagnostic information, and monitor performance. These devices are primarily configured, managed and maintained by network administrators through a command line interface (CLI). When network management applications attempt to interact with the CLI of a network device, the network management applications also need to know when the CLI is ready to receive input commands. Because network management applications have no visual processing equal to that of the administrator, there is no clear way of understanding when the network device is ready to receive input commands.
Further, the ability to log into remote network devices and identify when the CLI is ready to receive input commands is a difficult problem because these network devices are manufactured by a variety of vendors operating under a variety of locales. Determining whether the CLI is ready requires the network management application to detect an almost infinite number of prompts. These prompts can range from special characters to any combination of letters and other language-based characters. Programming a network management application to detect and respond to each prompt among a vast and dynamic set of prompts would require continuous maintenance, including excessive research and development hours and cost.
The present disclosure will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. Generally, the drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.